When the Italians lit up the Colosseum in Rome after I declared the moratorium, I thought I got a sense that this was a big deal. But really, I didn’t know the half of it. Yes, I was the first governor to declare a moratorium. And yes, I did it not because I was morally opposed to the death penalty—I supported it. I made that clear.
It was that I said I didn’t trust the system to kill the right people—that was what really struck a chord. I didn’t realize it was going to erupt into the international debate that it actually became. I really didn’t. I had no idea.
The American media came calling in droves. From the print media came the big boys—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Of course, the two major Chicago papers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, were on it all the time. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Peoria Journal Star, and the State Journal-Register in Springfield were joined by the Washington Times, the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald, Newsweek, Time, and Brill’s Content.
The moratorium was discussed and I was interviewed on the CBS News programs 60 Minutes and The Early Show; the ABC news programs Good Morning America, This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, and Nightline; the NBC news program Today; the HBO program Dennis Miller Live; National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation; PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; CNBC’s Geraldo Live, the BET Network, and the Courtroom Television Network. In addition, I had been interviewed for radio and television programs in Switzerland, France, England, Germany, and Canada.
Anna Quindlen, in her column “The Last Word” in Newsweek, said that while DNA had helped show innocence, “it really is the character of one elected official that has turned the capital punishment debate on its head. God bless Gov. George Ryan of Illinois. Faced with the astonishing statistical news that more people on the state’s death row were being exonerated then executed, he instituted a moratorium. Though the governor is a conservative Republican and a death penalty advocate, he has said he doubts anyone else will be executed during his term.”
Ted Koppel devoted four hours of prime-time specials on the death penalty during September 2000. That was really unheard of. Koppel praised my decision to impose a moratorium as “an act of courage.”
The moratorium drew praise from the governments of South Africa and Mexico and accolades from the Italian Senate.
Paula Bernstein, a spokeswoman for the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that tracked all manner of statistics and rulings and developments in the death penalty, declared, “There is no question the moratorium has touched off a nationwide examination of the death penalty.” She said that just over a year after my declaration, more than 1,500 local governments and institutions passed moratorium resolutions. “Proposals to temporarily halt executions or to abolish them altogether have been introduced in nineteen states, and legislators in at least thirty-one are proposing bills to revise the way convicted prisoners are placed on death row.”
In New Hampshire, for example, the legislature voted to abolish the death penalty, although Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed the bill. Indiana governor Frank O’Bannon ordered a review of that state’s death penalty system. And of course, there was heightened pressure on Governor Bush, who steadfastly maintained the system in Texas was just fine.
Journalists across the country were beginning to tackle the death penalty in their own states in the same manner as the Chicago Tribune had—by examining every case instead of cherry-picking egregious examples. In addition, legislators and policy makers across the country were following Illinois closely.
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses Harrison II, an outspoken critic of the death penalty, had taken some action as well. He created a special commission to create new rules for capital cases in Illinois that were designed to even the playing field for people accused of a capital crime.
If I were ever to get complacent—and I wasn’t—the Illinois Supreme Court seemed to be ready to remind me that the death penalty system was broken. In August, the Supreme Court reversed or remanded six death sentences. Six! The Tribune accurately summed it up, not that I needed a summary, noting that the rulings “highlighted nearly every problem plaguing the state’s criminal justice system.”
Two of the rulings remanded the cases of Aaron Patterson and Derrick King for hearings to present evidence that they were tortured into falsely confessing by Chicago police detectives working under the notorious Lieutenant Jon Burge, who had been fired in 1993. Patterson, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a couple in 1986, had long claimed that he was beaten by detectives and that a plastic typewriter cover was put over his head, suffocating him. His case was particularly notable because while he was alone in the interrogation room, he had scratched his claim of torture on a metal bench, using a paper clip. King, who was condemned for an armed robbery and murder in 1979 in Chicago, claimed detectives struck him with a baseball bat twenty to forty times.
The court also sent two DuPage County cases back to the trial court. Ronald Alvine, convicted of a 1992 murder of a police officer from the suburb of West Chicago, was granted a new sentencing hearing—his third. The court held that a judge erroneously failed to grant Alvine a complete hearing before sentencing him to death. In the case of Darryl Simms, the court ordered a hearing on defense claims that prosecutors, including the current DuPage County state’s attorney Joe Birkett, knowingly allowed three witnesses to testify falsely. Simms had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a woman in Addison, Illinois, in 1985.
Daniel Ramsey’s conviction and death sentence for a shooting spree in 1996 was set aside and a new trial was ordered. The court held that the insanity law used at Ramsey’s trial had been voided because it violated the Illinois constitution. Ramsey had been sentenced to death for shooting two young girls to death and wounding three other people.
The court ordered new legal briefs to be filed in the case of Milton Johnson, who had been sentenced to death for murdering four women in a ceramics shop in Joliet, Illinois, in 1983. The court said that Johnson’s attorney had done such a terrible job that the defense had to file new briefs. The briefs that the attorney, Louis Redmond Jr., had filed were lacking in citations to the record and the law. The court noted that the case number had been incorrectly listed, then was crossed out and the correct number was written in by hand. The court also noted that Redmond’s claim that he was worried about the brief being too long was ridiculous—the brief he filed was twenty pages under the limit of seventy-five pages.
At the same time, the court upheld the death sentences in two other cases. Still, the track record of half of all death cases being reversed continued. I could only shake my head in disbelief.
On a Sunday in September, nearly one thousand people gathered at the First United Methodist Church in Evanston to call for a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty. Democratic US representative Jan Schakowsky, who had sponsored a bill calling for a national moratorium, declared, “The system is so flawed. In my view, it is irreparably flawed. There is no way to craft a system that is infallible.
“What a sea change there has been on this issue,” she said, noting that more and more congressmen and congresswoman were seriously considering supporting her proposed moratorium bill. She also recalled how, when she first ran for office, her opponent called out her opposition to the death penalty. “That would not occur today,” she said, “because the sentiments are different in [public opinion] and in legislative bodies.”
At least one judge weighed in against the moratorium. Illinois Supreme Court Judge James Heiple, who was retiring and apparently felt compelled to criticize it, gave an interview to the Kankakee Journal, my hometown newspaper, during which he said the moratorium was illegal.
“The governor has no authority to declare a moratorium on capital cases,” Heiple said. “He can grant pardons. He can grant stays. He can grant reprieves in individual cases. But to declare a blanket moratorium on executions is something wholly outside his authority.”
Heiple, who had survived a threat of impeachment years earlier for allegedly using his position to avoid traffic tickets, said the exoneration of the innocent men was proof that the system worked. There was no proof an innocent person had been executed, he said. The real problem, he declared, was that the system took too long to execute the condemned.
Clearly, I disagreed with Heiple and my legal team told me I was on very solid ground. It was this sort of thing that seemed to take away from the real story—which was how to fix a broken system.
I refrained from a public response. I would now let my actions speak for themselves.
Northwestern’s Larry Marshall felt no compunction about addressing the assertion that exonerations showed that the system worked.
“That’s complete and utter hogwash,” Marshall declared. “Those innocents who survive are the result of dumb luck, serendipity, even the hand of God.”
I hadn’t been seeking the spotlight in January, but having been thrust into it as a result of my decision, I had decided it was important that I explain and talk about the issues the moratorium had raised, such as fairness and innocence.
In September, I met with Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo during a trade mission to Mexico, a country that has no death penalty. “I congratulate you on your death penalty moratorium,” Zedillo declared.
“I may not go back to the death penalty as long as I’m governor,” I said. “I don’t know. The worst nightmare can be executing an innocent man.”
Zedillo replied, “It took courage.”
“Our system was flawed,” I said. “We were one hour away from executing a man we had already fed his last meal. The United States is one of the only countries left among major industrial nations to have the death penalty.”
Invitations began arriving requesting me to speak at antideath penalty events. In October 2000, I traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to deliver an address with former First Lady Rosalynn Carter at an American Bar Association (ABA) event: Call to Action: A Moratorium on Executions. Among those present were New York University law professor Anthony Amsterdam, who had been described as the most distinguished law professor in the United States and who had argued the case (Furman v. Georgia) that had resulted in the US Supreme Court declaring the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.
The conference was an attempt by the ABA, on behalf of its four hundred thousand members, to galvanize lawyers nationwide to work for suspension of executions until the death penalty system could be reformed. The ABA had first called for a moratorium in 1997 and ABA president Martha Barnett said it was only in the past year that the call was gaining momentum.
The conference was going to focus on racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty, the execution of juveniles and the mentally challenged, and the need for better defense representation.
Mrs. Carter preceded me at the podium and called for a “thorough examination” of the death penalty. “I am morally and spiritually opposed to the death penalty,” she said. “Even for those who do not share my belief, the questions that have been raised about the unfairness of the system, the conviction of the innocent, poor quality of legal representation, racial discrimination, and the imposition of the death penalty on mentally ill or mentally retarded people and even children clearly call for a moratorium.”
I began by praising Mrs. Carter for the contributions that she and former president Jimmy Carter had made to the country during and after his presidency through Habitat for Humanity. I used the occasion to note that Lura Lynn had helped build a house for Habitat for Humanity in Springfield. “I know she was impressed by all the volunteers who followed your example, Mrs. Carter, and gave of their time to work with a family to build them a home and a chance to live the American dream.”
And then, I got to the matter at hand.
“Ten months ago, I don’t think any of us thought we would be together here today in Atlanta to talk about the death penalty,” I said. “I’ve been in politics for more than thirty years; most of that time as a county board member, legislator, or executive office holder.
“I was a death penalty supporter. Like many other elected officials, I have believed there are crimes so heinous that the death sentence is the only proper, societal response for the criminals convicted of those crimes in a court of law,” I said.
“But a lot has happened to shake my faith in the death penalty system. I know a lot more about the administration of the death penalty in Illinois—and the more I learn, the more troubled I’ve become.
“You may not know that earlier this year, in addition to declaring the death penalty moratorium, I established a commission to do a complete reevaluation of the forty-year-old Illinois Criminal Code,” I said. “A study of the imposition of sentences can certainly lead any reasonable person to see the discriminatory disparities in the system.
“I may be a recent convert, but I have committed myself and my administration to the development and establishment of a system of justice that is truly just,” I declared. “I wanted you to know this so that you would know my concern with the entire system of justice.”
I recounted the story of the release of Anthony Porter, freed through the work of journalism students so close to his execution. I told of my review of the Kokoraleis case and how I ultimately allowed his execution to go forward. “I double-checked and then triple-checked,” I said. “I wanted to be absolutely sure and, in the end, I was.
“But it was a gut-wrenching, exhausting experience,” I said. “It all came down to me—a pharmacist from Kankakee, Illinois, who became governor—to make the final decision. Quite frankly, that might be too much to ask of one person to decide whether you owned a drug store or you were a Harvard-educated lawyer—we are only human.”
Regarding Porter, I said, “How do you prevent another Anthony Porter—another innocent man or woman from paying the ultimate penalty for a crime he or she did not commit? I said then and I say today, I cannot answer that question. What I do know is there is no margin for error when it comes to putting a person to death.”
In closing, I said, “It is a question of fairness. What I learned as governor is that the view changes when the buck stops with you. It is easy to be an ardent death penalty supporter when you don’t have to make the final decision about who will live or die. But when you sit in judgment, when you have the power to decide who will live and who will die—it is an awesome responsibility.
“In this country, governors have to make that ultimate decision. They must shoulder that awesome burden,” I said. “Since I made the decision I have made, I have endured my share of political attacks from people who don’t agree with me. That hasn’t deterred me one bit. I would make the same decision again.
“Many other people have told me it was courageous,” I said. “I haven’t let that get to my head either. That’s because I simply tried to do the right thing, regardless of whether it was popular. I will not tell other governors or elected officials what to do. All I can do is share what we have done in Illinois. We recognized that there were questions—far too many questions.”
On my way home, I had a recurring thought—I wished I could swallow some of the words of unqualified support for the death penalty that I had uttered in the past.